Why You Should 3D Print Your Architectural Model

You legally have to.

…If your building is in the City of Sydney region, and an increasing number of cities around the globe.

However, there are still many other reasons why you may want to 3D print your model. Here at BVN we use 3D printers for most of our projects (especially the larger ones) regardless of whether it’s legally required or not. There are a variety of reasons:

• It’s great for displaying a variety of options next to each other. After the process has been sorted out, repeating the steps with another model is fairly easy. Here at BVN, we also make some of our 3D-printed models hot-swappable¹, which Ayelen has been experimenting with for a recent UNSW project. After printing the context of the site, leaving a space for the actual design, we can showcase different options we’ve designed without having to do any more printing!

• It isn’t hard to 3D print a model from a CAD file. After a design has been created in Revit, Rhino, or any similar CAD program it’s fairly easy to convert it into a file that can be printed. No need for printing out scale diagrams or cutting and gluing tiny pieces of wood!
• There’s no need to worry about complex design shapes. Wood is notoriously flat, and requires glue. When combined with a need for thin surfaces, models with any non-conventional design form can be difficult to represent. 3D printing isn’t flat, doesn’t require glue, and generally copes with most architectural designs.

• It’s getting better and better. In recent years, 3D printing has become faster, cheaper, and easier for everyone to use. It’s also becoming more useful as new materials can be printed, such as wood and titanium, that can realise designs previously impossible to create. Barry here at BVN has been combining these techniques masterfully to create intricate designs like the model below. 3D printing will continue to get better, so why not learn how to get started now?

When it comes down to it, 3D printing is a tool for communicating your design. Whether that’s to a client, a colleague, or even for your own sake, the goal of the print is going to be to communicate. In order to know exactly the best way to communicate, you need to know your audience — who are they, what are their goals, and how do they learn? There’s a lot of potential to 3D printing, but it’s not the only technique for communicating your design. Some of it’s faults include:

• It’s static. Nothing about the 3D print will look different from one second to the next. In this way it doesn’t communicate as much information as other techniques might.
• It doesn’t show the aesthetic of the building correctly. Most 3D prints will only use one material while printing, and it’s likely that the material won’t even look similar to the design’s intended material. 3D prints show the form accurately, but they don’t accurately portray scale or aesthetic.
• It doesn’t always work. 3D printers, like all machines, sometimes don’t work the way we want them to. When prints don’t work out, it can take hours longer to finish a job than originally thought.

If, in the end, it doesn’t suit your needs, you may want to try:

• A Video. Videos are able to convey a building holistically from a variety of angles rather than just the form. Videos can also communicate a lot of information and keep your audience’s attention for extended periods of time, without seeming too dense. These things, however, make it difficult to maintain a professional standard — and if it doesn’t seem professionally done, it will be hard to recoup any image lost.

• A VR Experience. Stepping into virtual reality to communicate a building is something Barry Dineen’s team been experimenting with here at BVN, and it’s come out with promising results. This is as close to the real thing as a communication technique will get, being interactive, scale realistic, and aesthetically perfect, given proper modelling. There is also a lot of potential for innovation in this area, with new methods and technologies being developed all the time. The cost with this, however, is it’s very difficult to achieve. Being still an experimental technology², you’ll either require an expert or become an expert while building it. It’s also expensive to use, needing powerful laptops alongside VR headsets which aren’t commonplace just yet.

Finally, as all techniques have their strengths and weaknesses, combining them is the most effective way to communicate your design. A poster could communicate the technical aspects of the design while a 3D print shows your audience what the design actually looks like. A video could showcase the analysis behind your design choices while a VR experience could communicate what it feels like to be inside your design. In the end, it’s down to you and your design, and what you think will work.

The next post will discuss how you can practically get started with 3D printing your architectural models — from Revit/Rhino/Sketchup to print!

1. Hot-swapping is usually a term used for computers, for when something can be plugged-in or unplugged while the system is still on. Here, what we mean is that different models can be swapped in and out without having to do any more 3D printing. Same difference, right? ↩
2. VR is definitely not a new technology, the first headset having been built in 1957. However, it is new to architectural practices, and has only picked up speed in other industries relatively recently. ↩